Arizona Dreams

by Jon Talton

  She shrugged and nodded toward the open cavern of the warehouse. “Ninety percent of successful police work is luck.”

  I pulled out my revolver and followed her. We stepped through the wide loading door, avoiding the track of the car headlights. It was instantly hotter, if that were possible, and smelled of dust and mold. Once my eyes adjusted, I could make out Dana and Malkin, illuminated across the concrete floor. They were standing maybe fifty feet away, amid a dense stand of loading pallets and other warehouse castoffs. One of them had a flashlight. They didn’t know we were here. I could hear them talking, arguing. But I couldn’t make out the words. Lindsey took my hand and pulled me into an alcove of the vast space, where we waited.

  Little noises intruded from the street. Worries intruded in the dark: What if they were meeting people here, people who wouldn’t appreciate finding us and might have the firepower to prevail in an argument? Enough time passed for me to consider leaning back against the wall, and think better of it. You never knew when you might encounter a black widow in a mood. Then something clicked in my head, and I knew why they had come here. Suddenly the voices were closer, coming toward us.

  “It’s there, goddammit.” This was the voice of the demure soccer mom.

  “We can’t leave it here.”

  “Where else are we going to put it, Jared? In your trunk? You’re such a dumb bastard sometimes.”

  “Don’t be such a bitch, Dana,” Malkin said. “I wanted to make sure. I don’t trust things right now. This deputy is asking too many questions.”

  “He believes me,” Dana said. “He likes me.”

  Lindsey poked me in the ribs.

  “We can’t just leave it here,” Malkin said.

  “Why not? You said this place might be vacant for years. Don’t panic, Jerry…”

  And then they were gone. I heard the door drawn down, the lights went out, and we were alone in the dusty void. Then Lindsey’s pants leg became illuminated. She had brought a small black Maglite. She played the light around the big space. You could have played several football games in it simultaneously. Instead of echoing, the warehouse seemed to swallow sound. We walked toward the pallets.

  “I wonder how long before we drop dead in here of heat exhaustion,” I said.

  “Dave, people pay good money for hot weather,” she said. “Check it out, History Shamus.”

  She illuminated a cylindrical container, about the size of an oil drum. It was once maybe olive green, and had the markings of civil defense from the 1960s. But I doubted that it held drinking water as its lettering said.

  “Wait back here.” I took the flashlight and approached it. The “it” that was hidden, that should be moved, or might not be found for years. My stomach was tight and jumpy.

  “What do you think, Dave?”

  I knelt down and used the butt of the Maglite to push against the lip of the barrel. The walls of the barrel were surprisingly cool. Then I rested the flashlight against the metallic edge and tapped the other end with the heel of my hand. Again. Again. Then the top came ajar. The odor was instant and recognizable, primal and indescribable. Put it in a perfume bottle and call it Mortality. I coughed and fought my gag reflex and pried the lid all the way off.

  “Dave?”

  “Stay over there,” I said, my throat constricted.

  She protested but didn’t come closer. “I’m not a baby…Oh, God, is that smell what I think it is?”

  38

  I got to my feet and walked back to Lindsey. She took my hand. “All right?” she asked. I nodded my head. I said, “Let’s go outside and call the sheriff.” My tongue tasted vile. My thirst was consuming—I was thirsty enough to kill for water. We crossed the huge room walking in our safe small cone of light, for otherwise everything else was black. It was impossible to sense space, whether the ceiling was three stories above us, or three miles, and the far wall was only a destination we held as a belief in the undiscovered country. For just a few moments I had lost the composure that had always been my gift in tight situations. If Lindsey had not been beside me, I think I might have gone mad with fear and rage. The world was dark. My thoughts were dark. “Death solves all problems,” Joseph Stalin said. “No man, no problem.” Somebody had been doing a hell of a lot of problem-solving for a piece of desert real estate in Arizona, even if it did have an aquifer under it. The hundred or so steps we took before we could make out the wall were not enough time to provide answers, or even the right questions.

  And we weren’t alone.

  “That’s far enough.” The voice was Jared Malkin’s and suddenly an intense light was in our face. I directed the small Maglite at him but it was no competition.

  “Get your hands where I can see them!” he barked. I kept my right hand at my side, holding the Maglite with my left. There was no way to see if he was armed. Where the hell did he come from? Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Lindsey had retrieved her baby Glock and was holding it at her side, partly concealing it inside her fingers and palm.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Mapstone!” Malkin shouted. “I’ve got a gun and I will use it!” To make his point, he pulled the beam of his light off us and put it on the semiautomatic pistol in his other hand. Thank God for stupid criminals. By the time he returned the beam to me, I had the Python in my right hand and he was on its business end.

  “Shit,” he whispered. I couldn’t see his face, only a flashlight beam. I went through the usual commands, so the suspect has no doubt what you’re saying, and my nerve returned. I decided I would fire first directly at the light, then a pattern around it, just in case he were smart enough to hold it away from his body. So far, smart was not his MO. I decided I would give him five seconds to comply and then squeeze the trigger.

  Something buzzed in the ceiling and a bank of overhead fluorescent lights came on. I nearly shot right then, but I hesitated. Then everything was clear. Malkin was standing ten feet away, his flashlight suddenly impotent. Lindsey was still beside me, now in a combat stance. Dana was here, too. She was standing nearer to us, beside an electric panel and some boxes. Now her hands were holding a shotgun. This was no hunting gun, either. It lacked a stock, and was made for close-quarters use by the police, or the bad guys.

  “David,” she said, “you are such a disappointment.”

  “Put your weapons down slowly, now,” Lindsey said, shifting her stance toward Dana.

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch,” Dana said, and rather expertly worked the shotgun’s slide action to chamber a round.

  “Dana.” This from Malkin. “Dana, we can’t do this. It’s gone too far already.”

  “Don’t you get weak now, you son of a bitch,” she hissed. “It’s way too late for that. We wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t been afraid that the body had been found. Your fear made that happen, Jerry. But we can fix it. They don’t know anything.”

  “They knew enough to come here!”

  “They don’t know anything, baby.” Dana’s voice became reassuring, motherly. “So I was wrong about Mapstone being too stupid to catch on. But I also had the gut feeling we’d better come back in through the side door and make sure we hadn’t been followed. It’s going to be fine, baby. Nobody will figure this out. It’s too complicated. We made it that way. So when they’re dead, it’s all tied up.”

  “You said that the last time,” Malkin said.

  We were in a mess, inside an isolated warehouse, in a Mexican standoff. Part of my mind wondered whether that was a politically incorrect term now. I tried to weigh the chances we had against the shotgun if all hell broke loose, and they didn’t look good. I could fight fear and panic. Worry about Lindsey was harder. That’s why married cops aren’t partners. I tried to keep them talking.

  I said, “It won’t work, Dana. You’ll have to kill a lot more people. We know from Jack Fife that it was you who wanted to hire serious muscle to intimidate Louie Bell into selling. That’s how you got Adam Perez. And then you sent him to my office to kill
your husband and me, and make it look like I murdered your husband and then turned the gun on myself.”

  Dana’s mouth came open.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Perez isn’t dead. We withheld that from the media. And he’s talking. He wants to avoid the death penalty. It won’t be easy.”

  “David…” she began in a softer voice that chilled me.

  I shouted her down: “Why did you have Perez kill Davey Crockett?”

  “Who?” Malkin said.

  “The cripple in the old school bus,” she snarled.

  He said, “Oh, my God, what have…”

  “Shut up!” she screamed, and waved the barrel of the shotgun. Her finger was inside the trigger guard. There she was, my soccer mom, the non-student who had a non-crush on me, holding that shotgun with the same natural aplomb as Patty Hearst turned Tanya the Symbionese Liberation Army girl. She said, “We had to get those papers back! He was hiding them for Bell. Adam asked nice, and then he didn’t ask nice.”

  Lindsey asked, “Was it the same for Alan Cordesman and Louie Bell?”

  “Something like that,” she mumbled.

  Lindsey said, “It seems like a hell of a price to pay for a parcel of land…”

  “You have no idea,” Dana said.

  Just then, Malkin put his pistol on the concrete floor. “I can’t do this,” he said. “Dana, it has to stop now.”

  She almost swung the gun in his direction, but kept it on us. She said, “Shut up, Jerry!”

  “We can’t kill two cops!”

  “Baby, we’re about to get everything we wanted!” she said. “Arizona Dreams, the water it has to have…”

  I swallowed hard and said, “So that’s it.”

  “So that’s it,” Dana said.

  “How could you ever think you could get away with it?” Lindsey demanded.

  “We will get away with it,” Dana said coldly. She propped the shotgun on a box, keeping it trained on us. I had to settle for keeping the Python on her with aching arms.

  I said, “Arizona Dreams never had enough water to meet the legal requirement of a one-hundred-year guaranteed supply. I bet the investors never knew that.”

  They just stared. I went on, “Alan Cordesman never knew that, at first. But the Bell property had the water, and you took it. Too bad it’s not legal. The groundwater has to be on the property.”

  “That’s the law now,” she said. “The law will change. Among our investors are four state legislators. Arizona has to grow. That law is outdated. We’ll build a pipeline from the Bell land.”

  “But you were certified as having a water supply at Arizona Dreams.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “All that took was a crooked consulting hydrologist named Earl Rice. You met him back there in the water barrel. And then a lot of money for a man I know in the Department of Water Resources. Unlike Earl, he didn’t get cold feet and threaten to betray us. The government is too overwhelmed by growth to pay much attention to every development anyway.”

  Lindsey said, “Do you really think you can hold two deputies at gunpoint here in this warehouse at Twenty-Seventh Avenue and Van Buren and not have anyone notice?”

  “We won’t be here long,” Dana said. “Now drop your guns and get your hands in the air.”

  “You mean here in this huge white building?” Lindsey asked. “That’s nine-nine-nine.”

  My neck tingled. Lindsey was giving the radio code for officer needs emergency assistance. I tightened my grip on the Python.

  “Are you German or what, bitch?” Dana said. “Drop your guns!”

  ”That’s not going to happen, Dana,” I said.

  She said, “I really thought you’d let this go, David.”

  “When I didn’t, you sent Adam Perez to my office to kill your husband and me? The body count keeps going up, and you still can’t tie it up.”

  “We wanted to be together,” Malkin said, his hands in a pleading posture. “Tom lost his stake in Arizona Dreams. The gambling finally did him in. But it didn’t matter, because Dana would be with me.” He wiped sweat off his forehead. “How much, Deputies? Let’s end this in a businesslike way. How much would it take?”

  “Forget it, Jerry,” Dana said. “These two are idealists. That’s why they’re broke. I was sure as hell not going to spend the rest of my life broke, or in debt married to a hypocritical politician. Arizona Dreams is going to change all that…”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. My voice was raspy. Saliva refused to come into my mouth, only to evaporate in the hot air. “Why would Adam Perez still be denying he killed Louie Bell and Alan Cordesman? And when I think about it, I agree. Beating and shooting are his style; not an ice pick.” I looked at Dana. “I think that’s more your style.”

  She just looked at me like an insolent teenager. “Too bad I can’t get close enough to you, love.” She surveyed me with the shotgun barrel. “It was really easy,” she went on. “With Alan, his girlfriend was gone, and I rang the bell and asked if we could have a drink and talk. One thing led to another—he’d always been attracted to me—and later, when he was asleep, I just did it. Once you do it, it gets easier. So I found Louie in the casino. He wouldn’t talk to me. He just ignored me and started playing the slot. And I came up behind him, and gave him a hug, and held him real close. He only shuddered for a few seconds when I put it in…”

  The warehouse was silent except for a drip of water somewhere. It only fed my raging thirst.

  “So why didn’t you use an ice pick on your husband?” I asked. “Why trust Perez with the job?”

  “For the children,” she said evenly. “He is their father.”

  “Do not move!”

  The sound made me jump a little, but then I felt salvation. This was a new voice, but I couldn’t see where it came from at first. I kept the Python’s dual sights on the middle of Dana’s bilious orange blouse. Then I saw men in dark uniforms moving into the light. Jared Malkin raised his hands high into the air.

  “All over, Dana,” I said. “Don’t be a fool.”

  She looked at me with something strange and cruel in her eyes, and then she blinked and lowered the shotgun. Instantly there were half a dozen Phoenix cops on top of her.

  I looked at Lindsey. She smiled and indicated the small headset under her hair, and the cord running to her cell phone. “It’s a good thing you’re married to gadget girl,” she said. “Cherchez la femme, right?”

  Later, after I had consumed two cold bottles of water and Peralta had arrived, I walked over to the squad car and leaned down to the passenger window. Dana stared at me from behind the prisoner screen, her hair glowing dark red from the adjacent streetlights.

  “Why me?” I asked. “Why pretend to be a former student? Why concoct the story about your late father’s note?”

  She stared straight ahead, and then said, “You’re a dinosaur, Mapstone. There with your books and your history and your cases that nobody cares about. I heard enough from Tom to know if anything happened to you, nobody would care too much. The idea was to get Louie Bell out there, and make it look like he shot a trespasser, and then saw it was a deputy and killed himself. And we’d buy the land when it was all over.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “Bell never showed up. Perez got stuck in traffic on the 101.” She smiled. “You just can’t depend on people nowadays.”

  39

  “There’s going to be hell to pay,” Peralta said.

  No one disagreed. Lindsey, Robin, and I were arrayed around the kitchen on Cypress Street as the sheriff prepared his signature carnitas for dinner. The room smelled of garlic, onions, chili powder, and whatever mysterious ingredients went into his alchemy. Lindsey and I were nursing Beefeater martinis, while Peralta was on his second Gibson. Robin sipped white wine. Sinatra came from the stereo, overruling the sheriff’s preference for country music or the Beach Boys. I half listened to “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

  “Hell to pay,�
� Peralta repeated. “When it all shakes out, you’re dealing with the biggest scandal in Arizona since Charlie Keating and the savings and loan blowup. Maybe even worse. We arrested a guy at the Department of Water Resources today. Malkin had paid him half a million dollars and secret shares in Arizona Dreams LLC to falsify the water certificate. We’re looking at other departments in the state and county. How this development got approved is beyond me. Hell, there may be more like this out there. It may take months to find all the limited partnerships where assets were stashed. More cumin, Lindsey.”

  “It won’t be the first time speculators tried to dupe innocent Easterners,” I said. “It was common in the nineteenth century to promise land that was fertile and well-watered. People got to the West and found the land they bought was really nothing but desert.”

  “I knew you were going to try to teach, professor,” Peralta said.

  “I have a captive audience.” I toasted him with my martini. “Tales of the water rustlers.”

  “What about Enron?” Robin said. “This was kind of like Enron with land and water, all smoke and mirrors and crooked accounting.”

  “It’ll take years to sort it out,” Peralta said. “Arizona Dreams is in bankruptcy court, and the creditors will end up owning land that’s worth a lot less than they thought. Nobody will be building forty thousand houses there.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “What about Tom Earley?”

  “That’ll come,” Peralta said, sampling loudly from a wooden spoon. “He claims he’s a victim—that Dana lied to him about Arizona Dreams, persuaded him to buy out the Bell brothers. She did all the bad stuff. He wants to testify against her. Give it time. The county attorney will take it to a grand jury. In the meantime, Earley’s resigned. He’s been repudiated by the Republican Party. Everybody who was his buddy last week has a knife out for him now. Suddenly the sheriff’s office is the favorite department of the county supervisors. So I guess we’ll just have to keep you employed, Mapstone. Hell, I’m even going to give you two love birds a vacation in October to take your train trip through the Rockies.”